Surname Saturday + Saturday Night Genealogy Fun

HOSCH

Randy Seaver's, Genea-Musings, Saturday Night Genealogy Fun Challenge, offered a perfect opportunity to combine Surname Saturday and SGNF.

Surname Saturday

The Hosch surname represents my maternal grandfather's lineage.

For me, the Hosch surname is so uncommon that instinctively when you hear it, you some how know there is a possible connection even if it was eons ago. The origins of this surname are Germanic and could have come from

• Northern Germany: Nickname from reduced form of Middle Low German hovesch ‘courtly’, a derivative of hof ‘court’
• South German: probably a nickname for a scornful person, from Middle High German hoschen ‘to mock’, hosche ‘mockery’
• (eastern German, of Slavic origin): from a pet form of the personal name Johannes (1)

Although, I can safely say that the bulk of my ancestors do not hail from Germany, there appears to be strong evidence, my granddad's blue eyes, that somewhere along the continuum of my ancestors, we more than likely have a European / Germanic ancestor.

There are many variations in the spelling of the name because of the way it is pronounced, at least in the South / Southeast, which does not correlate to how it's spelled at all. The most common spelling of the name is Hosch, which is how the slave owning family spelled the name and hence how the bulk of my ancestors and collateral relatives spelled it. However, the slave owner's and my family both pronounce it hush (like push but with an H). This explains how even within the descendants of the slaves, there was one variation in the spelling. Granddaddy Hosch's cousin Eli spelled it Hush. Other variations include Housch.

There is a town in Georgia, Hoschton, that bears the surname and yes, my ancestors are connected through slavery to the three men that the town was named after. Their dad, Lt. Henry Hosch, was the last or next to last owner of my 2great grandmother Matilda and their granddad, Matthew Hosch, appears, from all evidence gathered, to be grandmom Matilda's original owner. However, the first slave owner, in this line of the Hosch family appears to be Jacob Hosch, Matthew’s father, who migrated to SC in the 1700s from PA.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun Challenge


The instructions for this week were as follows:

1. Find out the geographical distribution of your surname - in the world, in your state or province, in your county or parish. I suggest that you use the Public Profiler site at http://www.publicprofiler.org/worldnames/, which seems to work quickly and easily. However, you cannot capture the image as a photo file - you have to capture the screen shot, save it and edit it.
2. Tell us about your surname distribution in a blog post of your own (with a screen shot if possible), in comments to this post, or in comments on a social networking site like Facebook and Twitter.

I went to the Public Profiler Website and entered "Hosch" in the surname field.

The profiler showed the highest distribution of the surname in Austria (48.61 FPM). Others were Germany (23.19 FPM), Switzerland (9.58 FPM) and USA (6.99 FPM).

I then checked the distribution in the US. Surprisingly, Iowa (79.28 FPM) had the highest distribution in the US with Cascade, IA being the top locality.


1. http://www.ancestry.com/facts/hosch-family-history.ashx

Until next time!